Nowadays, customers have been used to purchase and use e-books, music files, movie files and software files (generally referred to as digital content items hereinafter) in additional to the traditional counterparts such as paper books, CDs carrying music files, DVDs carrying movie files and Disks carrying software files. Furthermore, more and more customers have a need for reselling the digital content items purchased from content providers, just like they have been long permitted to resell the traditional counterparts.
The publication US 2011/0231273 A1 discloses a secondary market for previously sold digital media content. Each of the previously sold digital media content items can include a utilization right and a transfer right. The transfer right of a media content item grants a right to transfer ownership of the utilization right of the media content item to another. The transfer right can include multi lower level rights, such as different permission levels for this right, durations, restrictions, encoding, a right to reformat, a right to modify fidelity, a right to embody within specific tangible medium types (DVD, BluRay, flash memory, etc.), and the like.
In the publication US 2011/0231273 A1, a transfer right is introduced to define a right to resell a media content item, but there is no disclosure about the management of the transfer right.